Transparency

Every year, state governments spend billions of dollars providing the services citizens and businesses depend on to create a thriving state. Accountability and public scrutiny are necessary to ensure all state funds are used effectively.

In recent years, state governments across the country, including Oklahoma, have created transparency websites that provide checkbook-level information on government spending – meaning that users can view the payments made to individual companies as well as details about the goods or services purchased or other public benefits obtained. These websites allow residents and watchdog groups to ensure that taxpayers can see how public dollars are spent.

Several groups evaluate and grade the efforts of states to provide meaningful access to data, and the Oklahoma government is committed to ongoing efforts to improve these rankings.

Datasets that Oklahoma makes available and that affect the various transparency grades we receive include:

Vendor Payments

Payroll

Pcard Information

Tax Credits

Improvement and Innovation

Oklahoma has continually received high scores in a number of reports ranking the online transparency efforts of state governments, with special recognition for efforts toward making data easier to understand by providing user-friendly visualization tools.

Oklahoma continues to improve both the number of datasets made available to citizens and the tools available for accessing and understanding that data. With the launch of the new data.ok.gov site, Oklahoma’s government extends its commitment to continual improvement and innovation in providing open access to deep information about state affairs.